Manuel and Dario and the director told stories about fucked-up campaigns they had worked on across the country—bosses buying off workers, and calling Immigration to deport workers, and hiring people to stalk and beat up workers. They told stories of the scrappy antics of organizers, who, under the make-or-break urgency of factory strikes, stole truck keys and threw them into sewage grates or funneled sugar into gas tanks or smeared cement paste into the padlocks of factory gates in the middle of the night. I remember thinking that I understood the function of this all-night swapping of stories, that it was driven by the righteous indignation and pride that sustained people through the insanity of the job of union organizing—and at the same time worked to replenish it. It was a way to take control of what our stories mean. And as I sat on the motel bed listening, my own anger became more immediate and available, and it covered over the shame and sadness I had felt before. Looking back, I wonder if the exercise worked on the others in this way as well, if being able to center anger, to uncomplicate our relationship to the fight or at least uncomplicate our responses to it, comes with practice, like hope, and if practicing was what we were doing together in that room.

Inside the factory that afternoon, the managers shut down production and held a pizza party. For the first time in the factory’s twenty-plus-year history, all of the workers on each shift were allowed in the lunchroom at the same time. La Sandra had decorated with balloons and streamers and wall signs that read THANK YOU FOR VOTING NO! and NO TO UNIONS, and WE ARE UNITED (NOT UNITE). She stood in front of the workers and interpreted for El Mero Mero, who thanked the workers for their loyalty to the company and said that the company had acquired several new hospital contracts and that there would be increased production flowing through the factory, and that workers would have to work hard and cooperatively to achieve the level of production output that would be required, and that if anyone there didn’t want to work hard or if anyone there was unsatisfied with how the vote had gone, they knew where the door was and they should leave right now.

Our work together was more targeted than the swath of home visits I was doing with the other committee members—we needed to fill gaps in the record Paul was assembling. We had Antonia’s statement about her warning, but needed to talk to Reina, who was working near Antonia on that day, so she could testify about what Antonia told her when she got back to her iron machine. We had Pollo’s statement about La Sandra saying that the factory would close if the workers unionized, but we needed Alberto, who was in the same meeting, to corroborate Pollo’s story. According to Paul, the trial would hinge on this kind of corroborative testimony. But Reina and Alberto and others who had seen and heard the company break the law—Guillermo and Lupe and Santos—were afraid, and so the conversations we were having with them were longer and more difficult than any we’d had before. At first, the visits ended with I don’t know, or Let me think about it, or I still support the union, but my family needs this money, to which you would say, Your family deserves more money than we are making, and so does mine.

Reina’s youngest son always wanted to wear your bracelets and would run into the backyard to avoid having to return them to you when it was time for us to leave. Lupe’s daughter liked to sit on my lap while she went in to stir whatever was on the stove for dinner. Analía’s son let me help him with his third-grade homework, which was in English, which he was just beginning to speak. We made stops that were natural extensions of these relationships, but which, at the time, seemed unrelated to the union fight: We went to a neighbor’s house to translate notes that had come home with kids from school. We went to a grandparent’s house to call immigration lawyers. We went to a cousin’s house to help complete unemployment forms or file for workers’ compensation for an injury at another workplace in a different industry.

That summer, we heard a lot about violent boyfriends and husbands. We sat with a new coworker, who told us through split and swollen lips that domestic violence shelters called Immigration on people without papers, so she had nowhere to go. We had heard from another worker about a church that would sometimes let undocumented women stay for a night or two, but she did not want to go. You put together a list of the women who had this kind of trouble plus some of the members of our organizing committee—the ones who could drive and the ones who lived near the houses with the violent men. We made copies of the list, and you passed them around during our visits, telling people to call through the list—day or night—if they were afraid. One night, Analía did call, and three women showed up at her house with baseball bats. You called me that night, and I rushed from the motel to pick you up at your house, but by the time we arrived at Analía’s, her boyfriend was gone.

So being afraid that we were going to lose was no surprise. And there was no relief in saying it out loud, except that there was someone to whom to say it. You tipped your chin up slowly and nodded once, a gesture I had seen many times during house visits when the person we were talking with shared a story or a detail more intimate than what you had expected. An acknowledgment that a rare and precious thing had been released, and that you were watching it travel the distance between the people who were present and then fill the space of the room or yard or wherever we were.